In the 30s, lefty politicians like Huey Long got popular, because Lefties of all walks of life had big ideas they could rally around (socialism! Populism!!) , and that solidarity allowed them to put pressure on mainstream politicians and demand substantial changes : FDR had the New Deal, and LBJ had the Great Society, and even Nixon started the Environmental Protection Agency , started Earth Day, and strengthened welfare.

And then to fight back, the big-business types circulated the Powell Memo. They didn’t have the numbers, but they had their own, big, unifying idea they could all rally round. (neoliberalism! Deregulation!).

But ever since Reagan got elected in 1980, liberals have been playing defense, trying to preserve the shreds and tatters of government programs while conservatives – on the other hand – keep moving the goal posts more to the right. The conservatives keep dreaming bigger and bigger, they’re demanding things that would have been political suicide even in Reagan’s time.

Sure, the Right is better funded and organized, but maybe the main problem with the Left is BEING ON THE DEFENSIVE IS NO FUCKING FUN. It’s hard to get motivated to march for SLIGHTLY LESS SHITTY! Or to demonstrate for COULD YOU CUT THE FUNDING A LITTLE LESS THAN YOU WERE PLANNING TO CUT THE FUNDING? It’s hard to organize a huge door-to-door campaign to raise awareness of MAYBE YOUR POVERTY IS NOT 100% YOUR FAULT FOR SHITTY DECISIONS YOU MADE. It’s hard to get people to volunteer their time and money for TRY TO RAPE SLIGHTLY LESS THAN 28,000 OF OUR OWN DAMN SOLDIERS THIS YEAR.

Frustrated 99-percenter types of today lack the unifying big ideas AND the money of the Old Left and Big Business. But what if there was a way to turn tour disorganization into an advantage?

What we lack in big, unifying ideas, we can make up for that in sheer numbers of daffy, unique, individual UTOPIAS. I’m talking about how a “homebrew utopia movement” should become A Real Thing. As much as I gripe about it, The internet is actually a huge help in this : just look at how many insane or stupid ideas not only get famous but spontaneously create communities, where people who (pre ‘net) would have persued their hobby in shameful solitude, actually compete with one another to see who can get the most far-out with it!

A “homebrew utopia” movement – where everyday people dream up alternative societies the same way they now write fan-fiction, youtube diaries, fantasy-football – could be like a giant game where people compete to see how many of our society’s unspoken assumptions they can discover, expose to the light of day . .. and then think of alternative societies based on DIFFERENT assumptions. Put another way, how many sacred cows they can fillet!

HOMEBREW UTOPIA MOVEMENT

The point is: overwhelm fuckers with diversity. I’m not seriously saying one single utopia will become a huge movement (which itself is a way-too-utopian plan!) . My plan calls for SUCCESS THROUGH FAILURE. Let me show you how:

The more different utopias people come up with, the smaller and blander it makes the dem-repub consensus look: “Oh you think Obama is crazy? Well get a load of THIS guy!”

Even if people don’t agree with any given utopia (by their very extreme all-encompassing nature, utopias are pretty hard sell to begin with!) . . .it’ll get people off the defensive and onto the offensive.

It’ll also get regular people to realize “Hey, did you see that jackass on the internet with his crazy commie/nazi/feminazi/asexaual/extraterrestrial fantasy? That utopia is ridiculous because it goes against this basic assumption of society . . .hey! I never realized we were all making that assumption. Which means even though THAT utopia was bullshit, means there must be OTHER assumptions, other ways to do a society. Hmm, maybe I should do my OWN utopia just for fun!”

Like I said, the Overwhelm With Diversity works to the advantage of a populace without money, political power, or a coherent ideology:

It costs nothing to threaten the Man’s assumptions of how society should be run, and cops can’t stop it, since it runs totally outside the definition of “protest”. If you can’t overthrow the System, overthrow the assumptions that legitimate the system!

GO ON THE OFFENSIVE IN THE WAR OF IDEAS.

Get your utopia on! Don’t worry about if it’s politically feasible or if it would even work if you could implement it. Just get thousands of ideas out there, listen to other peoples’ ideas.

The irrationality is actually a PLUS. It’s one of the few good ideas the hippies had: if you’re fighting a system of rigid bureaucracy, efficiency, robotic rationality and soul-killing tradition, fight back with surrealism and irrationality.

The point is not that any one crazy idea will save us – the point is to destroy the decades-long and well-coordinated-at-all-levels-of-media-government-and-business PR campaign to convince us that wall-street casino capitalism, and race-to-the-bottom globalism is the only possible way to run an economy.

The point is to teach us how to go hog-wild, rather than to beg for a slight increase in funding for some social program which has been cut by 90%.

The point is to go on the offense again.

The point is to re-start our collective imaginations, which have been beat to shit, not by mind-numbing TV, not even by the internet, but our imaginations got beat to shit by decades of sullen grumbling about right-wingers’ steady progress. By decades of allowing the other side to dictate the terms of the battle.

(also remember: at the height of the liberal, big-government, help-the-poor and regulate-the-polluters ‘70s, all the Powell Memo ideas must have seemed totally un-doable, impractical, or downright silly. But now those ideas are basically the norm.)

Put the burden of proof on The Man to explain why the economy SHOULD grow, why banks SHOULD be allowed to make money, why people SHOULD work longer hours even though machines allow one worker to do the productivity of ten workers, (and even though since the 60s the worker has not been paid in proportion to her rising productivity!)

THE MOST POWERFUL IMPEDIMENTS TO CHANGE ARE BELIEFS THAT WE DON’T EVEN REALIZE THAT WE HAVE

We have big disagreements in politics – but only about stuff that one faction dislikes. But what about the 90% of stuff that both factions like? What about all the assumptions that are so ingrained, people don’t even see them, like how fish don’t know what water is?

For instance, the assumption that “economies must always grow bigger and bigger, every year, forever,” seems obviously wrong now – the planet has finite resources, duh! But back in the 50s, even bitter enemies like the US and the USSR were in agreement about the inevitability of infinite growth (think of all those Great Leaps Forward!). To be precise, they were BEYOND agreeing – It was so obvious it didn’t need to even be articulated, (you have to articulate something for anyone to agree with it)

Anyway, it goes to show how quickly such bedrock assumptions can turn into obvious falsehoods. All it takes is saying it out loud. “everyone can make more of everything every year without ever running out of raw materials or energy!” derrrrrppppp. The hard part is actually realizing that there IS an assumption!

So to retun to my theme: If making completely unreasonable, illogical utopias became a popular hobby, if nothing else, it would be like crowd-sourcing the exposure of unspoken assumptions that we have. And exposing those assumptions is ESSENTIAL to starting to have reasonable, logical conversations of how to fix society.

NEW-SCHOOL UTOPIAS

In fact, some contemporary wackos, like anarchist David Graeber or Archdruid John Michael Greer, are doing just that! Instead of doing regular utopias (where you start out by imagining a fully formed future society), people like Graeber and Greer start by REMOVING one central unspoken assumption of our society, and then try to imagine how society would change if people all stopped assuming that thing.

For instance: what would an economic system look like where the “value” of things, services, and people was based on how much they helped other people, rather than on how much money they made?

Or,

What would a society look like where there was no oil left, no coal left, and . . . (dun dun dun) without oil or coal, you couldn’t have the energy to construct a world-wide replacement network of solar/wind/ocean-power plants? In other words, what would a society look like if every small village had to make its own power and replace everything it took out of the ecosystem?

Or,

What would a society look like if there was no concept of “debt”?

Or,

What would a democracy look like, if the concept of “majority vote” was applied in the workplace, every day, instead of in a polling booth, once every 2 years?

And so on. Most utopias have been based on an end point. This new breed of sort-of-utopias is based on a starting point: taking today’s real world, then tweaking one central thing, and imagining how things would unfold. However, despite exposing some unspoken assumptions of our civiliazation, none of these modern sort-of-utopias that I’VE ever read come close to actually fleshing out the answer in any detail. I don’t know if that’s because a) it’s really hard, or b) it’s really hard for someone (even an anarchist) who has been born and raised in 20th century monopoly capitalism to even contemplate?

In the past, when there was a revolution, gold would get seized. It didn’t matter if the revolution was Communist Russians, or Jacobin French, or Batshit Ayatollah-Lovin’ Iranian. . . regardless of the ideology, one thing held true: you “liberated” the gold and jewels from the oppressive rulers.

But that’s all about to change.

The next revolution – which, honestly I hope will NOT happen, for reasons which will become clear – but the next revolution is going to overthrow Wall Street plutocrats, whose money is NOT gold or jewels or even magical glowing scepters. Their money is all electronic, and what’s worse, the money is 90% in the form of electronic GAMBLES. That is to say, it’s in the form of “derivatives” or “swaps” or “foreign currency arbitrage index funds”.

All these aforementioned items are basically some variation of: “I made a bet with some other billionaire in another country that the price of something would go up or down in six month’s time. And I am simply trusting that that other billionaire will pay up if he or she loses.”

So even if your pitchfork-weilding mob has the tyrant up against the wall and a charismatic Che Guevara-like leader puts a Glock to the tyrant’s temple and says “Give us the password to all your swiss banks and Caymand Island trust funds! This money belongs to The People now!” . . .even if that DID happen, the money would simply VANISH.

Not because the Tyrant had some sort of pre-arranged scheme in place for just this contingency. But Because the billionaires on the other side of those gambles (which constitute 90% of the tyrant’s wealth, remember) would simply refuse to pay up:

“OOH GOODY! I lost my billion-dollar bet with the American Tyrant but he’s in the Bastille now so I’ll just pay my billion to Che Guevara here, even though I’m in a different country, and thanks to the deregulation of derivatives, nobody in the world even knows I’m on the other side of this particular bet! Sure. Hey, Che! Come and get a billion free dollars! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!”

And I’m not a financial wizard, but It seems to me that if many billionaires around the world stopped honoring their bets, this would cause the entire international casino to shut down, and all the “money” therein would just vanish into thin air.

You’d still have a certain amount of gold, and physical assets like factories and mansions and hovercraft, and maybe bonds? (or maybe not, depending on if the Revolution overthrew just the rich or the whole government). But derivatives, man, kiss those goodbye.

It would be like raiding Scrooge McDuck’s giant Olympic-sized pool of gold coins, and then watching 90% of them evaporate in your hands.

So whoever is in charge of the revolution, buddy, you got to think of a plan for how to deal with that.

Some of the more goofy Occupy people are fond of pointing out that back in the Bible times there was something called a Debt Jubilee – every x number of years all debts would be forgiven, slaves would be freed, repossessed land would be given back to the serfs, etc. What if we modernized that? What if, instead of a Debt Jubilee we had a SECURITIES JAMBOREE? Like every June 12th, all the gambles would stop for a moment, and all the money floating around the financial-economy would have to be liquidated and invested in the real economy – whether that’s land, paintings, hookers, buying companies or gold or sweet-ass geodes or limited edition lego minifigs or whatever – just real tangible things. On the minus side, that would make the price of real things go way the fuck up to the point where regular non-millionaires could no longer afford rice crispies or sweet geodes. But on the plus side, if all the oligarchs had to sell off their intangibles at the same time, the value of their intangibles would fall through the floor. Which would be fun to watch.

Or how about another version of a SECURITIES JAMBOREE, where every August 4th, the PHYSICAL ASSETS WHICH UNDERLY ALL YOUR DERIVATIVES which you’re gambling on . . .they ALL get PHYSICALLY DELIVERED TO YOUR DOORSTEP. Are you gambling on the future of pork prices or oil? Well here is a million hogs and 2 billion gallons of crude. Maybe you can put it on the tennis courts? Are you gambling on the price of the Yuan? Well here is a shipping container full of actual coins for you to get your Scrooge McDuck on in. Make sure and bring a snorkel! Are you doing high-speed trades of companies where you don’t even know what it is? Well apparently the microsecond when the jamboree clock ran out, you had just bought a sewage treatment plant. So here it is! Right to your house! Enjoy!

So even though those are crazy ideas, you have to know the problems in order to start thinking of solutions. And the Tyrant’s Evaporating Money trick is just one of the problems that a revolution will face in this day and age.

And this leads to a broader topic, as it usually does when I’ve been drinking.

OLIGARCH SELF DEFENSE.

This “all my wealth will evaporate if you try to grab it” scenario is just ONE of MANY counter-attacks the oligarchs can pull if the rabble rises up. And by “rises up”, I don’t mean armed revolution. Oligarchs have been known to go into self-defense, blow-up-the-economy mode if people pressure their governments for simple things like closing tax loopholes or raising living standards for workers.

The main other O.S.D. attacks are:

1) capital strike – refusing to invest any money in new businesses, or refusing to loan any more money. This might seem at first like it would only work in small developing countries who are like “Please sir may we build a power plant so we can have electricity?” but the shocking fact is, even in rich countries like Japan, USA or Germany, successful big companies depend on banks for loans just to handle daily business.

2) Fire everyone and move the factory to a different country where people are more grateful to us! AKA the Friedman (Thomas or Milton, take your pick)

3) Capital FLIGHT. This is different than a capital strike. It means, “take all the profits I made/embezzled in country A, and stash them in a secret bank account in countries B through F.” This is like a capital strike but with more money laundering, and different motivations. Capital Strikes typically are done by legitimate banks, working together, in order to influence the governments to be more business-friendly. Capital flight is more of a solitary, shameful persuit, and with no goals to influence the government. Capital flight is more associated with banana republics, collapsing African nations, or Russia, where the rich are just like “OK, this country is over.”

4) Currency attack! AKA the Soros AKA the Asian Crisis of ’97. Here is how this goes: if enough billionaires get together and start making bets that the Yen (or the Deutschmark, or the Peso) will go down in value, then everyone else jumps on the bandwagon, and lo and behold! The price DOES start to go down. And down. And down. The first people to sell can make a shitload of money somehow, because they placed bets in advance that the price would go down. But for all the little suckers who are faced with the choice of, “Holy shit, my Dinars are worth 50% of what they were worth yesterday, either I sell them at a loss (thereby further driving the price down) or I hold on to them until they become altogether worthless!”

5) Bond attack! Like currency attack, but on government bonds. AKA China and Saudi Arabia Basically Own Most of America Now. This is more of a crazy suicide attack, because bonds are like money America owes China. So they could destroy us by wiping their ass with our bonds, saying “These American bonds are bullshit funny-money from a not-legitimate government!”, setting them on fire, then selling the fecal ashes on Ebay for $2 bucks per pound. But they’d be destroying themselves in the process. But it might be worth it! Actually I’m not really sure of all the ramifications of a bond attack.

6) The CRISIS OF CONFIDENCE. AKA the “BUNCH OF FUCKING BOND TRADERS?!??” Unlike the currency attack, and the bond attack, the C.O.C. (shoutout to Mike Dean!) is deployed early and often, since the ‘70s. It goes like this: “You, the government, need to borrow from us, the bond traders, in order to finance your pet liberal/conservative/whatever programs. But we bond traders won’t buy any more government bonds unless you convince us that inflation will go down, enabling us to make more profits on our bonds. And the only way to keep inflation down is austerity, and cutting social programs. Oh and incidentally this will cripple other non-wall-street industries like housing, exports, and cars, but none of those industries can destroy your political career like we can, so they can go fuck themselves.”

7) RUN ON THE BANK aka TOO BIG TO FAIL. This one became super popular since 2008: “Mr President/ Fed Chairman/ Secretary of the Treasury! You have to bail out me and my friends because if we go out of business, we’ll take the whole economy with us! All the companies who deposited money with us will go bankrupt. And everyone who THEY owed money to will likewise go bankrupt. And no one will ever buy American stocks or bonds again!”

Anyway, those (plus the SCROOGE MCDUCK EVAPORATING MONEY revolution-foiler I described above) are just the Oligarch Self Defense strategies THAT I KNOW OF. And I’m not even a member of the Bohemian Grove! Who knows how many other shady tactics oligarchs are paying accountants and economists to invent? My point is, there are like 100 books about the 2008 crash, and 200 perfectly redundant books about AMERICA IS UNFAIR AND WE’RE NOT GOING TO TAKE IT, and Noam Chomsky alone has written over 500 books. All these books are full of ideas for reform or calls for mass protest.

But there is, as far as I know, NOT EVEN ONE book that even begins to address how reforms or protests or revolutions are going to cope with all the Oligarch Self Defense strategies. And unless someone writes that book, we’re all doomed.

Many religious functions – explaining where we came from or when to plant crops – have been replaced by science. But even these days, science can’t explain the meaning of life or provide comfort to people who have lost a loved one.

But so what? Why even let religions have a monopoly on those two things? Fuck it, it’s time for secular saints.

By this I mean: make a list of people who are dead, who influenced your life greatly, who you wish you could be more like, or who you still think about a lot. . . . Then build a little shrine in your living room, and on the day they died, put their shit in the shrine (their books they wrote or albums they released or a picture of them or whatever), and take a little time throughout the day to contemplate:

a) All the happy times you had while listening to them or reading their book or going to see their movie or what-all

b) how you felt when you realized they were dead

c) what did they stand for? What did they make their fans do? how did they change things?

d) all the lessons you can learn in daily life from being more like them

e) and fuckin’ read their book or listen to their music or whatever it is, if they were a political martyr, I guess you could youtube their speeches or something?

I mean think about it: learning to be more like our idols helps us make our own meaning of life, and contemplating their death – and their legacy – helps us face our own. It’s like religion, but more practical, plus you can listen to some sweet jams and make the rules up as you go along. Plus as you get older, there will only be more people you can add to your list. It makes getting older fun, in a morbid way.

Plus, as I mentioned in a previous post on the word “spiritual”, you don’t have to be a religious believer to be appalled at how shallow, materialistic, and ad-driven our society is. Having a little shrine is a way to enjoy your favorite people *without it being mediated by some big corporation*, just you and them, without anything being bought or sold or tweeted or favorited or memed. If nothing else it’s a way of saying “not everything can be reduced to a transaction or an advertisement or a fucking number or a social media post. there is still more to life, there are still private things, even private connections between me and dead people.”

There are a few problems in the system which I haven’t worked out:

1 ) Should you also include “secular devils”? ( i.e. people who made you really happy when they died?) Do they really deserve their own entire day of hate? Like Ronald Reagan? Answer : sure! One whole day of walking through the living room and flipping him off every time I pass? That question answers itself. After all the misery people like him or Thatcher or OBL caused, why not have a little fun with it? God I can’t wait until Mariah Carey or Oliver Stone or fucking Eric Clapton dies.

2) should you include historical dead people who influenced your life and outlook? Or just dead people whose death you experienced, whose death affected you when you heard about it? It’s a lot more personal if you can actually remember where you were when you heard, “Hey Jam Master Jay got murdered.” “He WHAT?”.

3) Where do you draw the line? I can only think of half-a-dozen deceased people that are serious role-models, but hundreds of dead folks who I love their work but if I’m being honest haven’t really changed my outlook on life or nothing. But maybe if I had them in the shrine and really contemplated what they stood for, maybe they COULD still become role-models? (I’m provisionally handling this by putting all the really high-powered fuckers in glowing yellow type, thereby giving them official Saint status)

download lyrics to everything from Closing Time through Real Gone, as a Word document, right here.

Just like the deal with my collection of Marvel superhero dick pics, I’d always assumed that someone had already taken care of this, but since the internet was falling down on the job, I went ahead and did it.

In this case, I was just copying off of various lyric sites and pasting it and, inevitably, adding my two cents about what songs were good.

Seriously what the fuck is up with that? What kind of obscure conspiracy could possibly BENEFIT from such blatant last-name manipulation? What’s Their ANGLE?!?

Robert rich – one of the early early drone guys. did “overnight performances” where the audience was supposed to sleep. Not only does his name have TWO “r”s, but also, he has actually done collaborations with Steve Roach, which is just further proof of The “R” Conspiracy.

Steve Reich – modern classical minimalist and tapeloop guy. The best of the bunch!

Main songs: “music for 18 musicians”, and “come out.”

Looks like: any CEO on casual Friday, dockers and baseball hat.

Steve roach – new agey faux native American drums and synths, meditation stuff, but super thick walls of epically reverbed synths. Again, he even has the same FIRST NAME as another “R” guy. It’s like They are DARING us to call them on their Conspiracy!!!

Main album: Dreamtime Return

Looks like: Stephen King with a bird’s nest on his head. Giant eyebrows.

BANDS THAT , WHILE OBJECTIVELY BAD, ARE STILL ARE MORE ENTERTAINING OR THOUGHT PROVOKING THAN LOU REED:

ABBA

INSANE CLOWN POSSEE

THE SCORPIONS

THE BENNY HILL THEME SONG

KANSAS (the “carry on my wayward son” band)

Is no one going to fucking say it?

Fine.

I’ll be the bad guy.

Lou reed was not any good. His music wasn’t even bad. It was just, meh.

People kind of admit this when they say “but he was INFLUENTIAL!!!” which is a roundabout way of admitting they don’t personally listen to or enjoy his music. But even “influential!” basically just means that “arty white person bands are a lot less creative than you thought” . . . . it doesn’t mean “lou reed was rad.”

Just by a morbid coincidence I DLed a lot of his solo albums a week before he died, so I know what I am talking about. And don’t talk about velvet underground. In a just world that band would have been officially called MO TUCKER AND HER LITTLE PALS. I mean they had 3 good songs; waiting for my man, white light, and “heard her call my name”. . . all of which had those Mo Tucker beats. Except for some stoned giggling and various comical guitar solo attempts, Reed was incidental.

See also : Reed influenced dickless noise bands like sonic youth. Tucker influenced really nice bands like NEU! and Faust. Again, this is objective truth. (Tucker also was a huge influence on Can, but I can’t co-sign the Can vocalists, any of them. Shut the fuck up Japanese Robert Plant.)

I’m not glad he’s dead, though. I saw some video interview of him in the ‘80s with an insane jew-fro-mullet and he was telling Lower East Side war stories from when NYC was all Escape From New York / Fort Apache The Bronx – style. It was an amazing batch of stories. If dude had just gracefully retired from music and done the Henry Rollins thing he could have been one of the best storytellers. This, incidentally, is not a problem unique to Reed. Lots of musicians are more interesting as people than musicians, (AKA the “the music is the least interesting thing about him/her” phenomenon).

I guess my main beef is with music critics, not with the dead man. First, claiming that he “invented punk.” Everybody knows that THOMAS EDISON invented punk. No, wait, I meant Ronald Reagan.

Second reason why critics are terrible: look at the list I posted at the top of the rant.

MARYLIN MANSON

J GEILS BAND

KID ROCK

MC HAMMER

CRUCIFUCKS

FALLOUT BOY

STYX

BILLY JOEL

All these bands had like 2 good songs, which is probably 1 more than Reed had in his solo career. So logically rock critics should praise all these bands JUST AS MUCH IF NOT MORE than they praise Reed.

And they should say typical sentances like: “J Geils band (famous for their hits “Centerfold” and “Love Stinks”) invented industrial music, as well as punk, classical, and meringue, and the demise of this band will forever live in rock history”

or sentances like: “Styx, whose brand of working-class-rock-meets-broadway-musical has influenced the course of rock history, also invented black metal, wigger slam, horrorcore rap, and the minuet.”

AND YET ROCK CRITICS HATE ALL THOSE BANDS. Despite the totally objective fact that they are just as mediocre and “eh” as lou reed.

So, in conclusion: critics are underpants, lou reed = fallout boy, “influential”= “I don’t personally listen to it but you totally should”, some musicians should just tell stories, and Mo Tucker was the main good thing about VU. Also, if the record industry took my advice and simply ONLY PAID ROCK STARS IN HEROIN, we would have been spared this guy’s output, as well as his pathetic obituaries (see also: kobain, Hendrix, etc).

hard-gay manga event YARO FEST @ tokyo big sight. That’s right: not BL but actual gay comics by gays. The emphasis seems to be on “indie” comics, not “maninstream”. YARO FEST is part of a larger hentai comics event called COMIC CITY SPARK 8, but I don’t know what other “specialities” are represented at COMIC CITY; I’m just going for the dudes.

Chocolate Chiwawa is a used clothes store for drag queens and burlesque dancers and used-clothes fiends; it’s also sort of a fixture of the Kouenji underground, and it’s having a 15th aniversary sale/party. It’s the sort of place where you don’t just go to shop, you go to meet other oddballs and hang out. So even if you’re not a drag queen or stripper, you should come and support it.

The owner , Suma-Q, is one of my best friends in tokyo, and you can read my interview with her HERE.

3) Sunday October 20 in Meiji Kouen (nearest station is Sendagaya , on the chuo/sobu line): NATIONAL PROTEST AGAINST BULLSHIT EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITIES FOR YOUNG PEOPLE THESE DAMN DAYS!

Booths and festival starts at 11 AM, speeches and rallies start at 1PM, then there will be a march.

This is supposed to be a giant protest of young people who feel shut out of the steady-paycheck job market that older generations enjoyed, and exploited/preyed upon by giant temping corporations, living paycheck to paycheck, can be laid off at any time, etc. Also, they are protesting the TPP treaty, the lack of daycare/maternity leave for working mothers, rising education costs, Abenomics, and the increasing numbers of youth forced to work in semi-illegal un-regulated and un-safe “black market” jobs.

Apparently they do not have a website. The event, if you want to look it up in Japanese, is called 全国青年大集会2013.

Just once in my life I’d like to see a “music scandal” that actually WAS ABOUT MUSIC. “Miley Cyrus’ new song is all in 13 / 7 polyrhythms. . . and it’s 27 minutes long!” “ASAP Ricky’s new song only uses a jaw harp and musical saw, nothing else!” “Lady Gaga’s new song consists entirely of samples from Youtubes of crimes used in courtroom proceedings. . .AND it’s 19 BPM.” To me, THOSE qualify as “music scandals.” But in our dumb media world, the more “shocking” the performer is, the more conservative and middle of the road their song is. Garun-fucking-teed.

Compare with Stravinsky: when he debuted Rites of Spring, there was a full-on riot in the classical music venue. Like for real, old white Euro dudes in tuxedos all punching each other in the monocles, old white ladies all choking each other out with their own pearl necklaces and shit. That is a funny visual, but if you think about it, AT LEAST THEY CARED ABOUT THE MUSIC.

And isn’t it pathetic how predicatable “scandals” are? For guys: drugs! Groupies! Arrests at Customs! For ladies: sideboob OMG! Makes me nostalgic for the ‘80s when you’d have a scandal like TITLE OF SONG IS A DOUBLE MEANING or PRINCE SAID A CUSS.

Let’s face it: the entire, ritualized world of media scandals is less than 1% of ACTUAL shady showbiz behavior, so why should the audience settle for that year after year?!? The REAL rock/showbiz scandals are the ones THEY NEVER TALK ABOUT.

How about a ROLLING STONE-type magazine that dealt with the REAL rock-stars of the industry:

The Crooked showbiz lawyers, bootleggers, managers, record label people. . . and the massive industry-wide organized-crime presence that makes it all possible.

Articles like: “top 10 record labels which only exist in order to launder drug profits (with full-color pie charts of where the money goes!”

Or: “Can You Match the Label (or promotion company, management company ,etc) With The “Family” of their “Secret Investor? (answers on page 95!!)”

You could have a pull-out section: real-estate ads listing foreclosed former MTV cribs.

Instead of TOP TEN HIGHEST-SELLING SONGS, you’d have TOP TEN HIGHEST-GROSSING SCAMS. Like:

“Guess Which Of Your Favorite Stars Doesn’t Own Any of Their Own Songs? (special bonus round: Guess Which Of Your Favorite Stars Didn’t WRITE Any of Their Own Songs?)”

Accountants: “I not only screwed the band, but I kept it hidden from the much more expensive accountants that the record label hired to double-check on me! (Part 5 of 6)”

Drug dealers : “I Got A Yacht Named Eminem And A Hovercraft Named DMX, And I Can’t Even Rhyme”

Do a weekly Label Executive Irony Challenge: Mr. “I bought controlling interest in a shotgun company with royalties I scammed from Nirvana” vs Ms. “Stealing the rights to Pink Floyd’s WE DON’T NEED NO EDUCATION paid for my daughter’s entire tuition at Harvard”. Who will win? (Answer: Ms. Pink Floyd, because her daughter majored in copyright law).

And my personal favorite category of scumbag: The sketchy relatives-of-relatives-of-relatives that crawl out the woodwork as soon as someone gets that first million. The Sketchy Relative is a huge part of showbiz folklore that never gets the attention they deserve – they always have some ridiculous business idea that “just needs a little start-up capital, garunteed double your money back.” The funny part is, these scams are probably way more creative and original than the newly-rich Star’s music or movies or whatever!! For example: “A store where you punch chickens in the face” “like walmart but everything is made from alligators” “a line of tire-repair shops where bikini girls run a bingo game while you wait.” “FUCKING PRIME real estate on the river, dude! They’re going to run a freeway through there, build a derpity derp. Property values THROUGH THE ROOF my man! You’re lucky I’m even cutting you in on this deal!” Like, who do you think put more thought and effort into their hustle? the scumbag who has a “can’t miss idea for donuts with a fried egg in the middle” or the Star , writing lyrics for her new hit “Grind That Buttock (on the Dance Floor)”????

And it goes without saying that these articles would not be written in a Steve-Albini-Fuck-The-Industry-Expose-Their-Fucking-LIES type way. This magazine would treat the scammers AS IF THEY WERE THE REAL ROCK STARS. Totally kissing their ass and promoting them as huge role models. “Is it true that Stone Temple Pilots were begging you to stay even after you embezzeled all their tour money?” “How are you investing your Rhianna windfall? Any stock tips?” “Where are the offshore tax havens you’d recommend for next year?”

Instead of some handsome rock star surrounded by models, they photo shoot some pasty geek on the beach in his hideout in Bermuda, surrounded by spreadsheets. Total MTV CRIBS style. “This is where the magic happens *points to stack of contracts with Page 29, Paragraph 3, Section 2a highlighted*” “Here’s my garage with 4 cars that Sting paid for after knocking me up. Thanks, Sting!”

(insert random Gene Simmons quote where he talks like he is explaining the world to some dumb interviewer, then for contrast: insert a corresponding quote from the ACTUALLY smart guy who stole $4,000,000 of Simmons’ money while Simmons was face-down in a pile of drugs)

It’s not a word I like. It kind of implies that we have souls. Bullshit. When you die you go in the dirt and you’re worm food and that’s all there is to it. But that just means you should fight HARDER in life while you’re still alive.

Sure spiritual is a shitty term but the alternative is to give up without a fight, to surrender to all these Thomas friedman assholes who think that anything that can’t be quantified and ranked is worthless, that the logic of the marketplace should dominate all our moral reasoning and permeate every single area of our lives.

I mean, if you have a dumb job, but live in beautiful nature with a community of people who care about you and support your struggle, and then that gets taken away and you’re living in a strip mall full of dirty concrete and wendys and jiffy-lubes for mile after mile amidst a bunch of strangers who don’t give a fuck about you, and everyone blames themselves for being in debt, and fights over the crumbs. . . .that doesn’t show up on any accountant’s balance sheet. That doesn’t show up in GDP or any of the other yardsticks that The Man uses to measure success or failure. So on what basis do we all instinctively agree that one situation is better than the other? Spiritual shit is what. What else would you call it?

Living in a shithole town with no stimulation and only chain stores, living without community, fighting battles yourself just to stay afloat (while the elites are all very well coordinated against you, making deals in places you’ll never even see), that is spiritually fucked. People who have grown up knowing nothing else can’t imagine another future for themselves or if you ask them to try they say it’s gay or pussy. Their whole imagination got killed off. Those brain cells and connections never developed when they were young. That is a sort of spiritual violence that can’t be measured but it’s real.

BOTH the pro- and the anti- factions share this unspoken assumption that ethnic/gender studies is a kind of penance. (Which is funny because the pro- people generally shudder at the oppression of organized religion and etc. )

Here’s how the unspoken assumption works: the pro- people figure, “Hey I am one of the good people (gender or ethnic minorities) so why should I have to take studies courses in OTHER PEOPLES’ stuff? Why should I do penance when I am the victim?” Meanwhile the anti- people (men or white women) say, “I don’t want to take any ethnic/gender courses because they’ll just yell at me and make me feel bad. Why should I do penance if I’m not required to?”

Both miss the point.

These courses should be advertised to students, and taught, not as penance, but as a set of practical tools and techniques to achieve success in adult life. Just like “corporate” majors such as MBAs or programming.

The fact that BOTH pro- and anti- people are UNITED in face-palming after reading that, just proves how fucked up our attitudes towards ethnic/gender studies are.

Let me explain what I mean:

After you graduate, your room-mates, your boss at work, your future in-laws, your landlords, your clients at work. . . pretty much all of them at one time or another are going to be DIFFERENT FROM YOU. And they will have THE POWER TO MAKE YOUR LIFE MISERABLE. Even if you’re a white male heterosexual. This is true whether you’re working in a hipster coffee shop or a high-powered law firm. It’s true whether you’re a pottery major or a finance major. It’s true whether you’re a straight white man or a Latina lesbian. You have to learn how to get along with different people. You don’t have to learn every little thing about their culture or that their culture is better than your culture or whatever, but you should know enough to make small talk with them without putting your foot in your fucking mouth and jeopardizing your marriage/job/rental apartment.

Even if you’re a white man, you can get way farther in business if you impress your boss and clients that way. And just because you’re a Latina lesbian, you can still inadvertently offend your future Chinese boss or your future Nigerian mother-in-law or your whatever whatever. If you’re ignorant, you can piss them off just as much as a white man can.

These are practical skills. And unlike “corporate” or “technical” skills, (or Medieval English Lit / Postmodern Art theory majors too for that mater), the skills from gender/ethnic studies are transferable to ALL careers. So therefore they should be required of all students. Maybe it’s different but when I was in college in the late ’80s (?!?) ethnic/gender studies was something you majored in. So you had 90% of the students not giving a shit, and 10% that were garunteed to have no jobs after graduation, which is a distinctly weird idea of “empowerment.”

One of the OTHER things that both the pro-and anti- sides tend to overlook: since these courses are a form of technical training, you’re SUPPOSED to make mistakes. Like say you were taking math, if you wanted to get good at it, every semester you’d take harder courses, courses that you could barely barely pass, and you’d probably get like 20% of the answers wrong, even more at the beginning of the semester. That doesn’t mean you’re a shitty mathematician, it means that you’re pushing yourself to the limits of your ability. If you’re in your third semester and still doing long division just because you’re terrified of making any mistakes, you’re not a perfectionist, you’re a fuckup and no one will hire you to do their math.

This seems so obvious it doesn’t even bear writing down. . . except that in gender/ethnic studies the assumptions are the opposite!

If you make even one mistake, you can get a reputation for being a racist/sexist/homophobe and that reputation can follow you until you graduate or drop out. That’s not the fucking way to teach people to push their intellectual limits. Not only that, it gives students a huge incentive to not even talk to those in different groups, which is the EXACT OPPOSITE of what the programs should be doing!

In fact, at my school (University of California Santa Cruz), here is a thing that actually happened. The administration was faced with a problem: “Students of color have higher drop-out rates, which is probably because they are surrounded by whites and they don’t have a lot of role models/support from students of their same race, and subconsciously this makes them feel they don’t belong here.”

The administration’s solution? “For their own good we’ll encourage them to sleep in racially segregated dormitories.” I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried.

Another example: at UCSC there were 12 different dorm areas (‘campuses’) each with their own theme. Our campus’s theme was “multi-culturalism”. You’d think that ours would therefore of been the most popular party-campus at UCSC: Cinco de Mayo, St. Paddy’s day, Chinese New Year, Russian Get Drunk Day (M-Su), . . . but in fact, nobody from other campuses ever came to party here. Even people living here didn’t want to party here. Because multi-culturalism was taught as a form of penance! It wasn’t like, “Here’s a place where you can get burritos, injira, chana masala, AND won tons! At the same cafeteria! Fuck eating at MY campus, I’m gonna go to Schultz’ multi-cultural cafeteria!” it was more like, “We have 20 different flavors of EAT YOUR BROCCOLI IT IS GOOD FOR YOU.”

So counterproductive.

The measure of success of ethnic/gender studies programs should be “are the students talking and interacting with students from other groups more than when they first arrived at university?” But all too often the training just makes you want to avoid other groups lest you offend. The penance-based, study-only-your-own-group training is not just bad from a racist-white-male perspective, it also hinders oppressed minorities from uniting against The Man.

When teachers are creating ethnic/gender studies classes, Instead of thinking of “prejudice and unfairness are outrageous, so therefore how much outrage can we pack into one hour’s class?”, why not start with the goal: “let’s combat prejudice by making the students feel comfortable and respectful talking to people in other groups EVEN OUTSIDE OF CLASS, FOR FUN.” And then proceed to work backwards from that goal, designing the curriculum by asking “what can we do an hour a day in class to achieve that?”

Maybe you’re thinking, “Well, he’s a straight white man, so naturally he wants to de-emphasize the “teach the worst atrocities of history and then assign blame” aspect of ethnic/gender studies”. “ But according to Political Correctness, in a society where straight white male is the norm, the oppressed minorities pretty much HAVE to learn to talk to people like me just as a part of growing up, but people like me don’t have to learn to talk to others (it is part of our privilege). So when I am proposing a small-talk and discussion-with-strangers-based curicculum (however you spell it), I am actually proposing something that will be more difficult for people like me, something where non-white-males would have a built-in advantage. And as a socially awkward nerd who can’t even get along with the white middle-class kids in my high school, I’m sure I would have been terrified of this curriculum, but I’m also pretty sure I would have emerged a better person.

Teachers should say, “Look, you’re going to spend fully half of class time making small talk with people you’d never talk to ordinarily. you’re going to irritate people without meaning to. You’re going to have some awkward silences. If you’re not putting your foot in your mouth once a week, then you’re still doing long division when everyone else is doing calculus. If you’re not a white male, you don’t have to practice talking to white males more than you already have to, instead you should talk to folks in groups you have never interacted with before, where you can be the insensitive one.”

It should be OK to fuck up provided that you learn from it. Just like, I don’t know, every other area of education?!? There would have to be some mechanism for kids to judge whether an “offense” was based on racial/gender ignorance/bias, or whether the “offense” was purely personal. Actually even adults have no way to do this so maybe never mind.

Of course other steps can be taken to minimize the hurt feelings before they start. Like at the beginning of the semester all the students can write down the top 10 cliché things people outside of their group say that pisses them off or patronizes them, and those can be aggregated, and the aggregated lists can simply be passed out to the students, or used as fodder for simple role-playing skits done in front of the class, etc.

Also probably a good idea: role-playing skits where you pretend to be an adult in the real world, making small talk with your boss or in-law, or going out to a business dinner with a potential client, applying for a bank loan, chattering with your next-door neighbor, who is from a different group but who also has power over you. The problem is where would you find the people to play the adult roles? You couldn’t really have your Chicano teacher play all the minority roles, and you couldn’t have the students convincingly play adult roles. They should hire the fucking townies. Oh my god that would be traumatic! Let’s do it!

While we’re at it, let’s make “working class” one of the official groups. Let’s get upper middle class white girls and Asians to be able to comfortably communicate with droopy-stached mechanics. Let’s get upper-middle class theory-driven communist students to comfortably communicate with droopy-stached mechanics too. See how that goes! I mean if the point is to make you a well-rounded adult who can get along with all the people you have to get along with in the future, to cut down on awkwardness and unintentional patronizing/offense, of course laborers and mechanics would qualify as a group alongside the established groups.

Like I said before, the goal should be a sort of shallow knowledge of a dozen cultures, trying to cover the basics of small talk with future neighbors/housemates/spouses/in-laws/bosses/co-workers/landlords/work clients. What to say, what not to say, top 10 typical awkward moments, etc. It’s also important to learn people’s culture, not just the atrocities. Not just their holidays or favorite food, but just the WAY different groups talk, the different rhythms of conversation.

Most ethnic/gender conversations at my university all had to do with really heavy shit and blame for same. Again with the idea that “these courses are penance for sins.” Of course the conversations degenerated into petty arguments that went nowhere.

I’m not saying we should avoid teaching the truth about horrible things white men have done/are doing. Just, have some fucking common sense. If students aren’t comfortable even making small talk with different types of people, you want to plunge them straight into the Tuskegee experiment and gang-rape?!? Of course they’re going to wind up more divided than ever.

First of all, teach kids how to talk about non-controversial stuff. Let the white kids know that their future boss is going to be non-white, and what that feels like . . . and let the oppressed minority students know how easy it is to offend OTHER minorities, and what it feels like to be on that end of the equation . . . . and once everyone understands each others’ basic humanity, once you can talk about normal stuff without offending, THEN shift to the heavy stuff. Just writing this now it seems so fucking obvious. Why is this not the way it’s done?